An Introduction to Philosophy by George Stuart Fullerton (best free novels .txt) 📕

Locke, the empiricist, repudiated all this, and then also made assumptions which others could not, and cannot, approve. Kant did something of much the same sort; we cannot regard his "criticism" as wholly critical.

How can we avoid such errors? How walk cautiously, and go around the pit into which, as it seems to us, others have fallen? I may as well tell the reader frankly that he sets his hope too high if he expects to avoid all error and to work out for himself a philosophy in all respects unassailable. The difficulties of reflective thought are very great, and we should carry with us a consciousness of that fact and a willingness to revise our most cherished conclusions.

Our initial difficulty seems to be that we must begin by assuming something, if only as material upon which to work. We must begin our philosophizing somewhere. Where shall we begin? May we not fall into error at the very outset?

The doctrine set forth in the earlier chapters of this volume maintains that we must accept as our material the revelation of the mind and the world which seems to be made in our common experience, and which is extended and systematized in the sciences. But it insists that we must regard such an acceptance as merely provisional, must subject our concepts to a careful criticism, and must always be on our guard against hasty assumptions.

It emphasizes the value of the light which historical study casts upon the real meaning of the concepts which we all use and must use, but which have so often proved to be stones of stumbling in the path of those who have employed them. Its watchword is analysis, always analysis; and a settled distrust of what have so often passed as "self-evident" truths. It regards it as its task to analyze experience, while maintaining that only the satisfactory carrying out of such an analysis can reveal what experience really is, and clear our notions of it from misinterpretations.

No such attempt to give an account of experience can be regarded as fundamentally new in its method. Every philosopher, in his own way, criticises experience, and seeks its interpretation. But one may, warned by the example of one's predecessors, lay emphasis upon the danger of half-analyses and hasty assumptions, and counsel the observance of sobriety and caution.

For convenience, I have called the doctrine Critical Empiricism. I warn the reader against the seductive title, and advise him not to allow it to influence him unduly in his judgment of the doctrine.

64. PRAGMATISM.—It seems right that I should, before closing this chapter, say a few words about Pragmatism, which has been so much discussed in the last few years.

In 1878 Mr. Charles S. Peirce wrote an article for the Popular Science Monthly in which he proposed as a maxim for the attainment of clearness of apprehension the following: "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

This thought has been taken up by others and given a development which Mr. Peirce regards with some suspicion. He refers[4] especially to the development it has received at the hands of Professor William James, in his two essays, "The Will to Believe" and "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results." [5] Professor James is often regarded as foremost among the pragmatists.

I shall not attempt to define pragmatism, for I do not believe that the doctrine has yet attained to that definiteness of formulation which warrants a definition. We seem to have to do not so much with a clear-cut doctrine, the limits and consequences of which have been worked out in detail, as with a tendency which makes itself apparent in the works of various writers under somewhat different forms.

I may roughly describe it as the tendency to take that to be true which is useful or serviceable. It is well illustrated in the two essays to which reference is made above.

Thus, Professor James dwells upon the unsatisfactoriness and uncertainty of philosophical and scientific knowledge: "Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?"

Now, among those things regarding which it appears impossible to attain to intellectual certitude, there are matters of great practical moment, and which affect deeply the conduct of life; for example, the doctrines of religion. Here a merely skeptical attitude seems intolerable.

In such cases, argues Professor James, "we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will."

It is important to notice that there is no question here of a logical right. We are concerned with matters regarding which, according to Professor James, we cannot look for intellectual evidence. It is assumed that we believe simply because we choose to believe—we believe arbitrarily.

It is further important to notice that what is a "live" hypothesis to one man need not tempt the will of another man at all. As our author points out, a Turk would naturally will to believe one thing and a Christian would will to believe another. Each would will to believe what struck him as a satisfactory thing to believe.

What shall we say to this doctrine? I think we must say that it is clearly not a philosophical method of attaining to truth. Hence, it has not properly a place in this chapter among the attempts which have been made to attain to the truth of things.

It is, in fact, not concerned with truths, but with assumptions, and with assumptions which are supposed to be made on the basis of no evidence. It is concerned with "seemings."

The distinction is a very important one. Our Turk cannot, by willing to believe it, make his hypothesis true; but he can make it seem true. Why should he wish to make it seem true whether it is true or not? Why should he strive to attain to a feeling of subjective certainty, not by logically resolving his doubts, but by ignoring them?

The answer is given us by our author. He who lives in the midst of doubts, and refuses to cut his knot with the sword of belief, misses the good of life. This is a practical problem, and one of no small moment. In the last section of this book I have tried to indicate what it is wise for a man to do when he is confronted by doubts which he cannot resolve.

Into the general question whether even a false belief may not, under some circumstances, be more serviceable than no belief at all, I shall not enter. The point I wish to emphasize is that there is all the difference in the world between producing a belief and proving a truth.

We are compelled to accept it as a fact that men, under the influence of feeling, can believe in the absence of evidence, or, for that matter, can believe in spite of evidence. But a truth cannot be established in the absence of evidence or in the face of adverse evidence. And there is a very wide field in which it is made very clear to us that beliefs adopted in the absence of evidence are in danger of being false beliefs.

The pragmatist would join with the rest of us in condemning the Turk or the Christian who would simply will to believe in the rise or the fall of stocks, and would refuse to consult the state of the market. Some hypotheses are, in the ordinary course of events, put to the test of verification. We are then made painfully aware that beliefs and truths are quite distinct things, and may not be in harmony.

Now, the pragmatist does not apply his principle to this field. He confines it to what may not inaptly be called the field of the unverifiable. The Turk, who wills to believe in the hypothesis that appeals to him as a pious Turk, is in no such danger of a rude awakening as is the man who wills to believe that stocks will go up or down. But mark what this means: it means that he is not in danger of finding out what the truth really is. It does not mean that he is in possession of the truth.

So I say, the doctrine which we are discussing is not a method of attaining to truth. What it really attempts to do is to point out to us how it is prudent for us to act when we cannot discover what the truth is.[6]

[1] "An Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book II, Chapter I, section 2.

[2] Book I, Chapter I, section 4.

[3] Book I, Chapter I, section 1.

[4] "Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology," article "Pragmatism."

[5] Published in 1897 and 1898.

[6] For references to later developments of pragmatism, see the note on page 312.

65. INTRODUCTORY: THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES.—I have said in the first chapter of this book (section 6) that there is quite a group of sciences that are regarded as belonging peculiarly to the province of the teacher of philosophy to-day. Having, in the chapters preceding, given some account of the nature of reflective thought, of the problems touching the world and the mind which present themselves to those who reflect, and of some types of philosophical theory which have their origin in such reflection, I turn to a brief consideration of the philosophical sciences.

Among these I included logic, psychology, ethics, and aesthetics, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy. I did not include epistemology or "the theory of knowledge" as a separate discipline, and my reasons for this will appear in Chapter XIX. I remarked that, to complete the list, we should have to add the philosophy of religion and an investigation into the principles and methods of the sciences generally.

Why, it was asked, should this group of disciplines be regarded as the field of the philosopher, when others are excluded? The answer to this question which finds the explanation of the fact to lie in a mere historical accident was declared unsatisfactory, and it was maintained that the philosophical sciences are those in which we find ourselves carried back to the problems of reflective thought.

With a view to showing the truth of this opinion, I shall take up one by one the philosophical sciences. Of the history of philosophy I shall not speak in this part of the work, but shall treat of it in Chapter XXIII.

66. THE TRADITIONAL LOGIC.—Most of us begin our acquaintance with logic in the study of some such elementary manual as Jevons' "Lessons in Logic."

In such books we are shown how terms represent things and classes of things or their attributes, and how we unite them into propositions or statements. It is indicated at length what statements may be made on a basis of certain other statements and what may not; and emphasis is laid upon the dangers which arise out of a misunderstanding of the language in which we are forced to express our thoughts. Finally, there are described for us the experimental methods by which the workers in the sciences have attained to the general information about the world which has become our heritage.

Such books are useful. It is surely no small profit for a student to gain the habit of scrutinizing the steps by which he has come into the possession of a certain bit of information, and to have a quick eye for loose and inconsistent reasonings.

But it is worthy of remark that one may study such a book as this and yet remain pretty consistently on what may be called the plane of the common understanding. One seems to make the assumptions made in all the special sciences, e.g. the assumption that there is a world of real things and that we can know them and reason about them. We are not introduced to such problems as: What is truth? and Is any knowledge valid? Nor does it seem at once apparent that the man who is studying logic in this way is busying himself with a philosophical discipline.

67. THE "MODERN LOGIC."—It is very puzzling for the student to turn from such